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Saturday, 20 October 2012

No more global blasphemy law

Today, just a topic taken from the newsletter of the
National Secular Society. This on one of two posts this evening. If
you like these you should consider subscribing to the newsletter (here) and even joining the NSS.

Islamic bloc abandons plans for global blasphemy law at UN

The Secretary General of the Organisation of
Islamic Co-operation has revealed that it has abandoned plans to
introduce a global blasphemy law through the United Nations.

Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu said his 57-nation body would not
try again for United Nations support to ban insults to religion, saying
that Western opposition — particularly from the USA and Europe — made
the prospect of success very remote.

"We could not convince them," said the Turkish head of
the 57-member organisation which had tried from 1998 until 2011 to get a
United Nations-backed ban on blasphemy. "The European countries don't
vote with us, the United States doesn't vote with us."

Western countries see the publication of such images and materials as a matter of free speech.

The campaign for a worldwide ban on "religious
defamation" was revived after the posting of the Innocence of Muslims
video on YouTube. Twenty-five people have been killed during protests
over the video. Ihsanoglu told a conference in Istanbul at the weekend
that the OIC had failed to win a ban at the United Nations and would not
revive its long diplomatic campaign for one.

Asked about recent media reports that the OIC wanted
to resume the campaign for a blasphemy ban, he said: "I never said this
and I know this will never happen. The OIC respects freedom of
expression but sees anti-Islam videos and cartoons as an abuse of this
freedom that Western countries should sanction through their own
blasphemy or hate crime laws."

President Barack Obama condemned the video but made a
staunch defence of free speech. Responding at the United Nations last
month to the Muslim protests against the US he said: "The strongest
weapon against hateful speech is not repression, it is more speech – the
voices of tolerance that rally against bigotry and blasphemy," he said.

Meanwhile, a key proposal by Tunisia's ruling Islamist
party to outlaw blasphemy in the new constitution, which stoked fears
of creeping Islamisation, is to be dropped from the final text, Assembly
speaker Mustapha Ben Jaafar has told reporters.

The agreement to drop the clause follows negotiations
between the three parties in the ruling coalition and must still be
approved by the committees drafting the constitution, which Jaafar said
would be debated by parliament next month.

The move came after President Moncef Marzouki warned
that radical Islamist militants pose a "great danger" to the Maghreb
region, and following a wave of violent attacks — blamed on Salafists —
on targets ranging from works of art to the US embassy.

"There will certainly be no criminalisation," Jaafar,
the 72-year-old speaker of the National Constituent Assembly, told the
AFP news agency. "That is not because we have agreed to (allow) attacks
on the sacred, but because the sacred is something very, very difficult
to define. Its boundaries are blurred and one could interpret it in one
way or another, in an exaggerated way," he added.

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